NOVEL NEXT Chapter 472.
Chapter 472. A Slow Day on a Farm. (5/6)
If you didn’t know this girl, you might mistake her for a barbaric cold-blooded killer. I wonder how many people have seen this side of her. The number likely wasn’t very many, maybe a handful.
When she was done she stood up straight and whipped the blade to one side. The blood clinging to it flew away in a straight line leaving behind a distinct crimson streak across the grass.
“Are we done now?” I asked.
“Yeah. We’re done now. We can leave the rest of the clean-up to nature now.”
“Why’d you have to cut it open like that?”
“If yuh don’t do that, the thick hide that mature feral hogs have, make it a lot harder for scavengers to eat them. It could take weeks before the carcass is eaten. In the worst case, scavengers may not eat it at all and it could be left rotting and decomposing here for months.”
“I see.”
“Let’s head back to the shooting range now.” Dawn passed by my side but I grabbed her hand.
“Hold on.”
“She turned to me and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“You’ve got some blood on you, at least wipe it off.”
“Huh? Where?”
“You didn’t notice when it got on you?”
“No.”
“It’s on your cheek.” I raised my hand and wiped the feral hog’s blood off for her.
“T-Thanks.” Her eyes darted away to the side as she hesitantly asked, “Aren’t yuh… uh… grossed out after seeing something like this?”
“It was definitely an unexpected sight, but I’ve seen worse.”
There was no end to grotesque scenes that could be found hidden away in the farthest corners of the internet. If you could imagine it, it likely already existed somewhere online.
“I thought people from the city would be more grossed out by this sort of thing.”
“It depends. I’m sure a lot of people would be. But there are people in the city who do things crazier than you could ever imagine. Crime is much worse in the city compared to out here in the country after all. Your average sheltered citizen living in a big city could easily live their entire life without seeing any of the hidden atrocities by simply averting their eyes and looking the other way even if those things happened directly before them. But there are naturally a few people living in big cities that see all sorts of awful things happening behind the scenes on a daily basis.”
Naturally, the police were among the few who encountered these awful scenes. The sort of screwed-up things they saw on the job was nothing to scoff at.
“Have yuh… seen those sorts of things?”
“I guess you could say I have.” I suppose the time with Malory counted. It was definitely a lot more graphic than this.
“What exactly did yuh see?”
“Have you ever seen someone stabbed until they were a mangled, unrecognizable mess of flesh?”
“No.”
“I’d suggest keeping it that way.”
“That sounds pretty awful.”
“Yeah.”
Having said that, Dawn let me get some more practice at the shooting range while she went inside to take a shower.
When Dawn returned with a wet towel over her head, she didn’t call out and disturb my focus. Instead, she quietly took a seat behind me on the rock and observed.
I felt her gaze on my back, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. Somehow, feeling a gaze on my back was a bit nostalgic. Rosa’s face naturally came to mind. Dawn’s gaze wasn’t a sharp piercing one like Rosa’s, rather, hers felt light and fluffy.
…
It was only an hour later that Dawn finally broke the silence and asked, “Ran, aren’t yuh getting hungry yet?”
When she brought up the subject and I recalled that I hadn’t eaten for the day yet the hunger in my stomach finally registered. I always had this problem, whenever I got too focused on something I’d always forget my bodily needs such as eating and sleeping.
“Now that you mention it, I am.”
“Hmm, what should we do for food?” Dawn pondered to herself.
“How about I try to hunt something down?”
“Yuh don’t have a hunting license, so no. If it was a feral hog yuh were hunting, it’d be another story since they’re considered nuisances that can be hunted 365 days a year without a license. As for animals considered legal game, they’re actually public owned.”
I raised a brow and couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Even if they are on your property they’re public-owned?”
“Yeah, even if they’re on your own property they’re considered public owned. They may reside on our farm, to which we own the land, or at least pass through, but we don’t own the wildlife themselves. There are also legal seasons in which yuh can hunt game and yuh cannot hunt game animals outside of legal seasons in accordance with the game laws.”
I honestly wasn’t aware of that at all. I always thought if they were on your property anything goes. What a pain in the ass.
“Haaaaah. What a shame. I don’t exactly get an opportunity like this in the city. I was hoping to also learn how to skin and gut whatever I caught while I was here.”
“Why do yuh want to learn how to do that?”
“In case I ever find myself stranded alone out in the middle of nowhere one day and I need to be able to do it myself to survive.” I couldn’t always rely on Rosa for everything and it was a useful survival skill to pick up.
“Aren’t yuh the one who said yuh’d just roll over and obediently die in a zombie apocalypse?”
“It doesn’t need to be a zombie apocalypse. Maybe I’m on a plane and it crashes on an abandoned island. What if I’m the only survivor and I need to hold out until rescue is sent?”
“As if that would really happen.”
“Yeah, I doubt I’ll ever fly on a plane after bringing up this possibility.”
“Just because yuh brought it up?”
“You see, there’s this cursed thing called foreshadowing that I really hate a lot; in my mother’s words, it’d be called goat-mouth. So I’d like to not take any chances. The world seems like it has some sort of vendetta against me after all.”
“Goat-mouth? What’s that?”
“When you predict something bad happening and it ends up happening.”
“Why’s it called that?”
“I dunno. She heard a friend say it a long time ago and started using it too one day. I have no idea what the origin of the term is.”
“Do yuh think it’s related to Baphomet?”
“Bapho-who?”
“Baphomet, a sabbatic goat. It’s a hermaphroditic winged human figure with the head and feet of a goat.”
“Uh, I don’t really get how it’d be related.”
“Well, real goats can’t actually say anything for something bad to happen. Since they don’t talk, the next best thing would be a figure with a goat’s head talking instead, right?”
“I feel like that’s a stretch.”
“Yuh think? I thought it was a pretty good guess though.”
“Who knows? Let’s just grab something to eat already, I’m starving.”
“Uh, I’ll try to put something together with what we have.”
“Can you cook?”
“Yeah… sort of.”
“What do you mean by sort of?”
“Uh… a lot of what we eat is stuff grown on the farm as is. Dad isn’t really good at cooking and I never really learned. The most I know how to do is put meat in a frying pan, wait until it’s brown, and cut up some fresh fruits and vegetables.”
“When you say stuff grown on the farm, isn’t that limited to just four things? Wheat, soybeans, tomatoes, and carrots? Is that all?”
“We raise a few cows, pigs, and chickens for consumption too. So we have three different types of meat and also the eggs the chickens lay.”
“So… this is why you revere the city so much for its variety in food.”
“Ugh… yeah. Aside from when we visit a nearby town for something different to eat, we don’t get very much variety the way yuh do in the city. Out here if yuh don’t grow it yourself, yuh aren’t gettin it unless it’s something yuh can order online that can be shipped to a PO Box and won’t spoil from the heat.”
“Sounds tough.”
“It is. Sorry, yuh even treated me to something so good back in the city and I don’t have anything to match it.”
“It’s fine, I’ll eat whatever you put together as long as it doesn’t kill me. So don’t worry about it.” It couldn’t be anything worse than Alicia’s sweets problem.
“Okay… I’ll try my best to not kill yuh.”
…